Is Warfare the most realistic war film ever made?

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In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal and immersive new film, memory informs the events that take place in real time to a unit of soldiers in Iraq Warfare , Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy SEAL team alpha one is supporting Marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former SEAL, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not. Much of the press surrounding Warfar...
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Tell Me About It review – British Asian Gen Z drama bounces between crime and kitchen sink

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Two young women on a jaunt find themselves embroiled with drug gangsters in director Suman Hanif’s uneven feature

Here is a film set in the British-Pakistani community that focuses on two Gen Z girls on the cusp of adulthood: Halima (Nimrah S Zaman) and Amara (Ariya Larker). Halima is the daughter of an MP with plans to get tougher on drug-related crime, while Amara is just trying to get by despite a turbulent family life, with parents who seemingly can’t stand each other and a brother struggling to find his path in life and considering a job in a call centre. So far, so social-realist, but when Halima and Amara plan a weekend away, Amara gets kidnapped by accident by a goon working for a drug kingpin who, claiming “all brown girls look the same to me”, mistakes her for Halima.

The director, Suman Hanif, has said that Tell Me About It is aiming to hold a mirror up to represent the experiences of the British South Asian community; presumably this applies to the family dynamics and friendships more than the kidnap plot. It’s uneven stuff – the way that Hanif blends the contrasting elements of kitchen-sink realism, comedy and kidnap drama lands us somewhere in the same tonal zone of a TV programme like Hollyoaks.

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